The jokers
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| The jokers |
|---|
| Henri Rousseau , 1906 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 145 × 113 cm |
| Philadelphia Museum of Art |
The jesters also Joyeux farceurs or Merry Jesters is a painting by the post-impressionist French painter Henri Rousseau from 1906. It measures 145.8 by 113.4 cm and is painted in oil on canvas. It is part of the "Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection" of the Philadelphia Museum of Art . You can see a group of five unidentifiable monkeys with dark brown to black fur and a bird in front of a strongly stylized jungle landscape, predominantly in shades of green.
Image description
Four monkeys with dark brown to black fur huddle close together in the lower third of the picture. Their faces are shown in front view. The largest of them covers most of the bodies of the two smaller monkeys with its back running parallel to the lower edge of the picture. The bodies of the two smaller monkeys are arranged almost mirror-inverted on the vertical central axis of the image. The right one of the little monkeys is holding a white staff. The end of the stick closer to his hand ends in a bright red thickening. The body of the fourth monkey belonging to the group is covered by light green grasses that cover the entire lower edge of the picture. Only his face and one of his arms look out from between the blades of grass. In his hand he is holding a tapered stick at the end of which is a bottle with the opening pointing towards the bottom. The liquid in the bottle empties between the blades of grass under it. Another monkey of the same species is located directly below the horizontal central image axis, to the left of the central vertical image axis. His torso is shown in a frontal view and part of his face is covered by a hanging leaf. He has turned his gaze to the group of his own kind. The hair around the monkeys' mouths increases considerably, it almost looks as if they have full beards. The hair around the eyes is longer than the rest of the fur. In the smaller monkeys, the coat color in the beard and eyebrow areas changes to beige, while the coat color in the big apes is unchanged in these areas. Only a row of white teeth and highlights in his eyes stand out clearly from the dark fur. A bird sits enthroned above the monkey on a branch that protrudes from the right edge of the picture and is only sparsely leafy. Its breast plumage is modeled in different shades of beige and its silhouette is delimited by white, tightly fitting wings. Except for a straight, tall flower with many white flower heads and a small piece of blue sky in the upper middle of the picture, the entire rest of the canvas is covered by stylized leaves of grass, ferns and trees in shades of green and brown. The silhouette-like arrangement of the various layers of leaves does not allow any perspective depth modeling, they are more reminiscent of the sliding backdrop of a theater stage.
Image interpretation
Since Rousseau never left France, he cannot have got the inspiration for his jungle paintings first hand. The model for most of his depictions of plants were, for example, his own studies which he made in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Rousseau drew inspiration for his depictions of animals from postcards and various magazines, for example from Bêtes sauvages , an album of animal depictions that have become popular. Given these sources, it is astonishing that Rousseau does not depict the monkeys in captivity as he knew them from the cages of the zoological gardens in Paris. He literally frees them from their cages and transfers them into the artificial plant ambience of the greenhouses. He also lets the monkeys do human activities, here pouring from a glass bottle. The fact that the monkeys have no direct contact with the human-related object in the bottle makes the independence resulting from this freedom even clearer.
literature
- Götz Adriani: Henri Rousseau: The customs officer - border crosser to modernity . DuMont, Cologne, 2001, ISBN 3-7701-5590-4
- Christopher Green (Ed.): Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris . Tate Publishing, London, 2005, ISBN 1-85437-612-8
- Cornelia Stabenow: Rousseau . TASCHEN, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1363-X
Individual evidence
- ↑ The name "Merry Jesters" is in the book Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris , p. 144
- ↑ Date taken from: Cornelia Stabenow Rousseau
- ^ Emily Hage, from Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art (2007), p. 106
- ↑ Barbara Hein: Liberation from the thicket published in art magazin, issue 2/2012
- ↑ Götz Adriani in Henri Rousseau: Der Zöllner - Grenzgänger zur Moderne , p. 260